Monthly Archives: August 2011

There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.–Raymond Williams

Who are the masses that the “mass media” speaks to? What can it mean to ask what “teachers” or “blacks” or “the people” of a country think? These words are all fiction, a shorthand which covers over our inability to understand large groups of unique individuals. Real people don’t move in homogeneous herds, nor can any one person be neatly assigned to a single category. Someone might view themselves simultaneously as the inhabitant of a town, a new parent, and an active amateur astronomer. Now multiply this by a million, and imagine trying to describe the overlapping patchwork of beliefs and allegiances.

But patterns of association leave digital traces. Blogs link to each other, we have “friends” and “followers” and “circles,” we share interesting tidbits on social networks, we write emails, and we read or buy things. We can visualize this data, and each type of visualization gives us a different answer to the question “what is a community?” This is different from the other ways we know how to describe groups. Anecdotes are tiny slices of life that may or may not be representative of the whole, while statistics are often so general as to obscure important distinctions. Visualizations are unique in being both universal and granular: they have detail at all levels, from the broadest patterns right down to individuals. Large scale visualizations of the commonalities between people are, potentially, a new way to represent and understand the public — that is, ourselves.

I’m going to go through the major types of community visualizations that I’ve seen, and then talk about what I’d like to do with them. Like most powerful technologies, large scale visualization is a capability that can also be used to oppress and to sell. But I imagine social ends, worthwhile ways of using visualization to understand the “public” not as we imagine it, but as something closer to how we really exist.